From Earth to Outer Space: What and Whom is Worth Saving in the Race for Critical Minerals?
Space exploration, energy generation, warfare, disaster recovery: these activities rely on technologies and infrastructures positioned on Earth or in space. Hardware is comprised of minerals, metals, and materials—many now designated as ‘critical’ by national governments—that must be wrested from the Earth and fed into supply chains. Nearly all large-scale problems, and therefore nearly all solutions, rest on this extractive imperative. Yet this very imperative exacerbates many of the same problems it purports to solve: displacement, insecurity, and human suffering. This dilemma shapes our collective imagination of what kinds of futures are possible on Earth and in Space, and therefore what kinds of legal and physical infrastructures are needed for their realization.
Based on fieldwork in mining, energy, policy, and space development on four continents, this talk investigates how this dilemma plays out across sectors and places through common but often conflicting needs for critical minerals and interrogates…
Campus Locations: Alumni House - Eccles (ALUMNI). Campus Wide Event: Yes.
Thursday, March 26, 2026, 12:30 PM – 3:00 PM.
Faculty Friday Work in Progress - Chris Low, Director of the Middle East Center
Distilling Empire: Britain's Archipelago of Coal-Fired Water.
Campus Locations: Tanner Irish Humanities Building - Carolyn (CTIHB). Campus Wide Event: Yes.
Friday, March 27, 2026, 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM.
Spain in Sanmao and Sanmao in Spain
Professor Wan Sonya Tang will present a new research project on the Taiwanese author, Sanmao, who achieved Asian superstardom in the 1970s through her work chronicling her life in Madrid, Spanish Sahara, and the Canary Islands. However, Sanmao remained unknown in Spain (and the West in general) until her writing was translated into Spanish in 2016. Professor Tang’s project investigates how this oft-exoticized Asian woman in turn exoticized Spanish society, particularly from Spain’s peripheral territories. She also examines how the various Spanish lands she wrote about now claim Sanmao as part of their historical heritage. Ultimately, the study rethinks traditional models of Orientalization through an analysis of Sanmao’s work and Spain’s engagement with her.
Campus Locations: Tanner Irish Humanities Building - Carolyn (CTIHB). Campus Wide Event: Yes.
Monday, March 30, 2026, 12:00 PM – 1:15 PM.
“Imaginaries of Desertion: Settler Heterotopias in The Adventures of China Iron”
Faculty Fridays
Center for Latin American Studies, University of Utah
Title: “Imaginaries of Desertion: Settler Heterotopias in The Adventures of China Iron”
Maria Laura Martinelli (Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish)
This talk examines how contemporary fiction revisits and reworks colonial spatial imaginaries in the Southern Cone of Latin America. I focus on The Adventures of China Iron (2017) by award-winning author Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, a story that reimagines the nineteenth-century Argentine poem Martín Fierro from the perspective of his unnamed wife, “La China.” I explore how the novel envisions desertion—moving tierra adentro, into the “desert,” or “Indian Territory”—as a gesture of radical freedom. Set in Mapuche territories east of the Andes, this fictional, heterotopic space unravels the sexual and gendered dynamics of settler colonies while portraying the frontier landscape as emptied of history and politics, both challenging and echoing settler colonial logics.
Campus Locations: Tanner Irish Humanities Building - Carolyn (CTIHB). Campus Wide Event: Yes.
Friday, April 3, 2026, 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM.
Faculty Friday Work in Progress - Maria Laura Martinelli
Title coming soon!
Campus Locations: Tanner Irish Humanities Building - Carolyn (CTIHB). Campus Wide Event: Yes.
Friday, April 3, 2026, 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM.
Subversive Genes: Innovation, Appropriation, and Genetics Transformed in Latin America
Campus Locations: Tanner Irish Humanities Building - Carolyn (CTIHB). Campus Wide Event: Yes.
Friday, April 10, 2026, 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM.
Faculty Friday Work in Progress - Annie Greene, History
Title coming soon!
Campus Locations: Tanner Irish Humanities Building - Carolyn (CTIHB). Campus Wide Event: Yes.
Friday, April 17, 2026, 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM.
Theorizing Translation in Latin America
Campus Locations: Tanner Irish Humanities Building - Carolyn (CTIHB). Campus Wide Event: Yes.
Friday, April 24, 2026, 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM.
Memorial Day
University Observed Holidays
Campus Wide Event: Yes.
Monday, May 25, 2026.
Juneteenth
University Observed Holidays
Campus Wide Event: Yes.
Monday, June 15, 2026.